Google analytics for Beginners -Review

Understanding buyer journey is always important in any kind of business. Since of most of business are now using online tools and shops, Implementing google analytics and understanding user journey is not difficult. There will be some resources which are being use for business and there will be output coming from it. It may be drawing some benefits, or it may be losing some number of resources. Google analytics report will help us to understand about how resources are being utilized and how they are performing.

Under this course of CXL institute, I become familiar with some tools in google marketing platform. Google analytics, google data studio ,google tag manager are three important tools in google marketing platform. Each part contributes in different way. google tag manager helps in collecting different kind of data from website and app using different tags to be linked with given system. Google analytics stores all that information and generate different kind of reports which can be further visualized in better way with use of data studio. So, in and all they are helping us to draw more insights about business.

It is also important to know about how to setup analytics account when we are using it. In order to setup account ,we can use any google account and sign up for analytics and in property setting ,we will find tracking code which need to be linked with website or app .Once account is linked ,default view will be created and all data can be viewed in the different reports.

There are different reports which we can find in google analytics and each report offer unique information which is useful for business. Realtime report ,Audience report, acquisition report, Behavior report and conversion reports are main reports in google analytics. In order to understand data shown in these report ,it is also important for us to have basic knowledge about terminology in google analytics .Let me discuss it here in a brief .

All reports in google analytics are based on dimensions and metrics . Metrics are values which indicate quantitative data .Dimension on the other hand ,indicates what that data stand for. In most of the cases ,Reports are arranged in tabular format ,flow charts, vertical flow chart and line graphs .Most of data which we observed in google analytics report is historic data and in some cases it might be sampled data as once data is being collected from website it takes some time to process further and show in reports. In order to answer specific question for marketers , it may need to use some additional features of analytics in order to get required set of data as it might not directly available in standard reports of google analytics .For this we may need to use advance filters , segmentation of data or applying secondary dimension may be the case .

Also this analytics course from CXL gives qualitative information about account setup in analytics .Account setup in analytics means setting up account ,properties as per business objective, views as needed .Under this each of property setting we can find multiple options like tracking info, google product linking etc. similar kind of setting options are also available with view setting where we have additional options like filter setup ,goal setup etc. Each of these functions offer great benefits while generating reports in google analytics . Also these will be user restrictions in all account, property and view level setting. Only admin of given account can control access to view or property.

Now let us discuss more about different reports in analytics which help us in drawing insights. In real time reports ,we can observe data about users who are active on website in real time. We can check details about which page user is visiting , what is location of user ,which events/goals user is completing in real time etc .

In case of audience reports, we can observe details about past users .Based on client id generated via user cookies ,google analytics understand whether user is new user or returning user .Also we can find details about demographic of users under audience report. Segmentation is one of the fascinating option given under analytics report section. Segmentation can be used to find specific set of users and find details about them in given report. We can also find details about user interest and use that information for further marketing purpose.

In acquisition report, we can find sources of user traffic coming to our website. We can see how different marketing channels are performing against each other. Along with this we can also find further details about user activities and results of their actions in same report . In behavior report, we can find details about user activity on website. In conversion reports , we can find details related ecommerce setup and goals we have setup. We can take in depth understanding about how user is moving in goal flow and where they are dropping out.

With this google analytics beginner course, we can apply different kind of filters in order to create different views or viewing given reports in much better way. There would be some kind issue we may notice in basic reports that can be eliminated with the help of filters . Further there is additional option to create utm parameter which we can share under different marketing channels. Using utm ,we can check about user who followed that given link and visited website.

Goals are very important part in google analytics and can be used for various activities tracking. There are different type of goals like destination ,duration ,pages per session and event goals .Each goal can offer different advantage when it comes to consider business objectives.

Under google analytics there is separate report for ecommerce tracking. Under this we can have standard ecommerce and enhanced ecommerce .In enhanced ecommerce setup we can find more details like buy to detail rate ,cart to detail rate etc. these helps us for drawing more insight from given ecommerce report .In and all , Google analytics for beginner course in CXL has taken deep dive about basic usage of analytic platform and help me to understand each section in better way.